


All That's Left In The World

by sumomomochi



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Drug Use, Multi, Polyamory, Post SBURB, Self Harm, everybody kisses everybody, shit's fucked up but there's a happy ending, this is actually a really happy fic i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:21:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sumomomochi/pseuds/sumomomochi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think," she muses, "We test ourselves. What the game left us."</p>
<p>"I think," you tell her, "We're so used to the world breaking <i>for</i> us that we don't remember what it's like for us to be what's broken."</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That's Left In The World

You wake up when it's already dark, the sky so far above you hazy grey and framed by a concrete skyline. You spend what should feel like forever staring up at the nonexistent stars, a sight you are well accustomed to. You can still account for every second, your internal metronome going steady.

You won, you saved the world. Made a new one. Thirty-four players across five different sessions, but you won.

And you're lying flat on your back in some shitty alley in what smells like Houston.

You don't hurt, which is a plus. Your shades are still on your face, though lopsided, and you're in a hoodie you don't remember owning, which is disconcerting but warm. You go to reach into your sylladex, searching for your phone and.

And you can't find it. You can't even _feel_ where you sylladex should be. You do not maintain your cool.

You do not have your sylladex, or your strife specibus. You find your phone in your _pocket_ of all places, but that's all you have on you. And your phone is dead, of course, as if your new world couldn't not shit on you.

You find it's not hard to steal a new power cord. Iphones are still a thing in this 'verse and between your slick skills and the Time you can still wrap your fingers through, it's not hard at all. Technically, you don't even step through the sensor bars that would ping at the loss of merchandise, warping just enough to get by without setting them off.

And you find the date. It's April, John's birthday again, the same one that initiated the apocalypse. Years happened in the span of a couple of hours.

You are too old for this new world and you wish you could still fly.

xxx

There's no pesterchum either, you find, as soon as you have power flowing to your phone again. Pounding on the door to your apartment revealed only a tired old woman who had lived in there for twenty years, so you've had to comandeer the corner of the coffee shop a couple blocks away. You want to beat your head against the table. You settle for letting it drop against fake wood heavily.

xxx

Every time you go to input _turntechGodhead_ into any bit of technology ever, it immediately freezes up and shuts down. Same if you type _ectoBiologist_ or _tentacle Therapist_. Any screen name you or your friends used fucks tech up. Even the troll screenies do it.

xxx

You try Rose's number first. It and John's are still in your phone, despite you having never actually called them, and if there's one thing you need, it's your ecto-sister's infalliable logic.

You need her psychobabble to reaffirm reality.

You need her to tell you you're not going crazy.

Your knees just about buckle when the line clicks and a woman's voice says, "Hello?" You blank and try not to panic -- you don't actually remember what she sounds like. It's not until the woman repeats herself that you actually manage to force out words.

"Is, is Rose there?"

"Um, no? I'm sorry I think you have the wrong number."

"Sorry." 

You hang up and try not to cry. You still have another number, another quarter. You slide the coin into the slot and punch the numbers and pretend there are no tears running down your face when it just rings and rings.

An answering machine picks up and a smooth male voice in perfect newscaster says, "You've reached the Egbert residence, please leave your name and number after the tone."

"Oh fuck," you whimper, "Oh fuck, John, for the love of Karkat's stupid nubby horns, please pick up. Please. Please, please, _please_ pick up." You belatedly realize how thick your already heavy Texan accent has gotten in your distress -- now that you actually think about it, you can't remember how _anyone_ from the game sounded. You remember their words, but it's all colour, no sound. And if you don't remember, they probably don't either.

"It's Dave," you whisper into the receiver, "It's Dave and I really fucking need you to pick up, okay?"

There's just silent static and you let the call run until the payphone clicks off.

xxx

You call every day. You call until the answering machine quits picking up, and then you keep calling, because if the answering machine doesn't pick up then maybe it's full, maybe no one's erased it, so maybe you just keep missing John and he keeps all your messages.

Maybe there's no one to erase the messages.

xxx

You run yourself ragged as long as you can and when the chill of fall starts creeping in, you say fuck it and walk until you can't anymore, head clear out of Houston and halfway across Texas before you run out of bus, and then you follow a highway, walking backwards, thumb out.

It takes you three weeks to make it to Seattle. It takes you another two days to figure out where John's school is and how to get there. But you do. You get there and hide halfway up a tree on the edge of the campus until the last bell rings. And then you wait front and center in the Time hoodie SBURB left you as a parting gift.

Your poker face drops when you see him, but he drops literally everything -- his bag, his books, his half hearted faked conversation -- and bolts towards you. He shoves people out of his way and all but tackles you off the planter you perched on to be just that much taller, and you don't even fucking care. You curl around him and sob into his hair and time literally slows.

"I thought I'd gone fucking psycho," you mumble to him. The wind picks up and whips your words away but he laughs into your chest and squeezes you tighter and he's clawing at your back like a fucking banshee and you know you weren't the only one.

"Your accent sounds so stupid," he says, "How'd you even get here?"

Through spinning Time like red hot records, scratching forward through all the shitty bits.

You don't tell him that.

Instead you tell him, "I think I broke your answering machine." It comes out _ah think I broke yer ans'wrin machine_ and he laughs some more but you can feel the wet spot he's left on your shirt.

xxx

He's supposed to catch a school bus to his foster parents' house -- the game didn't let his Dad come back anymore than your Bro. He ditches and leads you to a city bus stop instead, sneers, "Fuck 'em," when you question why he doesn't bother informing his new guardians. You let it go and he tells you how you all went missing for three years, were born three years earlier too, as far as he can tell, how the world you left isn't exactly the world you came back to because _this_ one didn't have to prepare for the game. He talks about how he hasn't been able to find anyone else but Jane, who wound up in her house, except it's a mirror image of his, directly across the street, down to the same fucking curtains, how it's Jane and her dad and how they keep trying to make it so John can stay with them, with family, even if it's from another version of the universe.

About how everyone else is convinced that he and Jane went on some psycho acid trip and murdered John's dad and how now they're delusional. Amnesiatic. How sometimes even Jane's dad doesn't remember.

"At least I have Jane though," he says as the two of you step off the bus, "At least I wasn't alone when we came back."

You haven't stopped crying since he mentioned his alpha alternate.

You didn't catch wind of a single god damned potential of Dirk while you were in Houston.

In turn, you tell him how you woke up in an alley, how you don't actually _exist_ in this version of the universe, about how easy it is to steal when you can mold time. About how humans are paradoxically amazingly generous while still being unbelievably shitty to each other. You tell him about how you spent most the cold part you've been back couch surfing with ravers and about the time you got picked up for fighting in the street and brought down the entire Houston PD criminal server when they tried to put you into the system.

He laughs at that and it is so fucking beautiful.

You don't tell him about the dicks you've sucked, the pills you've popped, or the time you were beaten and left for dead in, ironically, the same alley you woke up in.

You just want him to keep laughing.

xxx

Jane tackles you, the same exact way John did, the keys she clutches in one hand digging into your ribs, and you all shuffle across the street still latched onto each other. She doesn't let you go until you get to the door to John's house. You barely get any choice in crossing the threshold, both of them shoving you through the doorway and they're tiny and soft but both strong as fuck and you almost trip on your feet on your way in.

It's fucking cold inside and everything smells like dust and the dead.

You don't even get a chance to complain before you're body checked into a wall and John attaches himself to you via his lips. You kiss, hard and desperate and Jane wedges herself against your side and his, and you're not sure who's trembling.

Maybe you're all trembling.

"You didn't find Dirk, did you?" Jane asks, her round, sweet face crumpled in and her icy blue eyes wet with tears. You shake your head no and don't even bother to keep a straight face. She pulls you in for an even tighter hug and this time it's John who wedges himself against your side, his face against your neck and his arm around her shoulders.

The three of you sink to the floor and you don't think you've cried this hard since you were a kid.

xxx

You wake up on the couch instead of the floor, wrapped up in a blanket. Jane's hip is acting as your pillow, her warm fingers carding through your hair. You can hear John talking, and the same voice in perfect newscaster you've gotten so familiar with replying. You sit up and rub at your face. You're still so fucking tired.

"You really need a shower," Jane tells you. She's not wearing her glasses and her face is still splotchy pink from tears. You shrug and wrap the blanket around yourself again, curling back into her. She holds you like the mother you never had.

xxx

You do, eventually, take a shower, water sputtering from John's rarely used pipes. It's not the worst place you've showered, and even though it smells of mildew, it's by far one of the cleanest showers you've been in.

You don't remember your last shower. You think it might have been in Portland.

You curl up around yourself in the bottom of the tub and let the water run over you.

John comes in around the time the water starts running fully clear again, your weeks of road grime actually washed clean, climbs in behind you and wraps his dark arms around your pasty, steam pinked skin. He rests his cheek against your spine and you can feel his dick pressed against your tailbone. He's flaccid; you're not.

"Dad's making dinner," he tells you, his voice quiet under the hiss of water, "Jane's leaving the door unlocked for us, so we can just go over whenever."

His fingers are sliding over your skin, rubbing wet circles over your biceps and the scaly, dried out skin of your elbows.

"Called my foster parents, told them one of mine and Janey's friends from when we were little surprised me and we're all over there for dinner." His hands are sliding down your thighs, not sexual but definitely intimate. You think he might be reassuring himself that you're real, that it wasn't all just a shared delusion. "They're good people. It's just. It's hard dealing with people who don't remember."

"Yeah," you say, and your laugh is a dry wheeze. He kisses your shoulder with a mumbled sorry and reaches over you for the bottle of shampoo. He almost drops it on his head when he goes to shake and the two of you almost rip down the shower curtain when you try to take the bottle from him.

He just laughs and laughs when you fail to pry the stupid fucking shampoo from his fingers and he grins against your lips when you kiss him angrily.

"Shut up and let me be nice to you, gosh," he says, laughing like he actually means it, and you give in. You let him push you back against the wall, out of the spray of water and watch him kneel in front of you, watch the hard layer of muscle he has behind his baby fat and the spattering of dark hair on his chest and stomach.

The shampoo is really fucking cold when he finally manages to get it to come out of the bottle. A glob of it slides down the back of your neck and you grimace. He laughs.

He laughs and his fingers are unbelievably gentle as the scrub at your scalp, slicking your hair back from your forehead, sliding over your temples.

This is probably the nicest anyone's touched you in months and you're still hard.

You end up rubbing one out while John holds your head to his chest. He calls you a perv but his laughter echoes off tile and you think he doesn't mind.

xxx

You don't exactly _live_ in the Egbert house. Jane is still the only one who wields the key, but the three of you are there often enough, talking or crying or sometimes fucking. You end up with a meager stash of possessions in a box under John's bed and a basket of clean clothes in the Crocker laundry room. More often than not, you end up passed out across a kitchen counter while Jane does her school work, or on the couch when John comes by to do his.

You spend your nights wandering and it's so fucking quiet in their nice little neighborhood but so fucking _alive_ a hop, skip and two buses away. You don't think John realizes where you go, but you know Jane does. You know she doesn't approve, but when you crawl through her window at three in the morning, high as a kite and dripping with rain and sweat, she lets you croon beautiful words at her while you touch her soft, silky skin so much sweeter with your chemical amplification.

And she breathes life back into you with every kiss so when you wake up shaking and exhausted you count yourself so fucking lucky that this time you don't have to crawl backwards through the universe to keep yourself from fucking up.

You try to promise there won't be a next time, but she knows that's a lie. She shows you tiny little razors spotted red and touches her pristine thighs, whispers about how John looks for height and leans out until it's up to the wind to push or pull.

"I think," she muses, "We test ourselves. What the game left us."

"I think," you tell her, "We're so used to the world breaking _for_ us that we don't remember what it's like for us to be what's broken."

"Maybe," and her breast is warm against your palm, and with a world of people you're still missing, neither of you mind when both of you sigh the wrong name.

xxx

"So I've convinced my foster parents to convince the state to let me go on a road trip this summer," John says brightly. You're all in various states of undress on his living room floor and you don't think you'll ever not give him shit for refusing to fuck his alternate universe grandma even though he'll eagerly suck the taste of her off your lips.

Jane grins and leans over you to fist bump her genetic mutation of a relation, and her tits almost fall out of her bra.

Dad teaches you all how to drive, even though you don't technically exist.

xxx

It's raining when you leave, cold and wet up in the mountains, and then all of a sudden really fucking hot. John and Jane both laugh at you when they have to stop three times just in the state of Washington so you can shimmy around the back seat to change. They laugh even harder when you end up dropping trow on the side of some desert road because your legs are too fucking long to manage in the back seat of the shitty coup they acquired.

xxx

It's two thirty in the morning in what is probably the biggest city to ever grace the mid-west and you got them to come out with you. Jane is actually enjoying herself, as far as you can tell, even though she's sober. John didn't argue when you tongued the pill into his mouth earlier, introducing him to your dear friend Molly.

He says he feels like he's flying for the first time since the game, and he's hard against your thigh as you grind into him, half hidden behind the monolith speakers.

You know that feeling, but you're not lighter than air like this, not like him. You're heavy and smooth and the flow of time just slides right over you rather than catching in all the tiny craters that litter your soul.

He comes in his jeans and you laugh at him, and then he's smearing his jizz down your neck and laughing at _you_.

You forget about the mess he's made until you wake up in the car at noon the next day, right on the dot. This time Jane's the one laughing as you pick crusted over spunk off your skin and John whines at her to pull over so he can change.

xxx

It takes half the time to drive coast to coast than it took you to hitchhike to Washington, and your halfway across Buttfuck Nowhere, Pennsylvania when the coup (John's affectionately named it Casey, as he does everything else) sputters and dies.

A pair of thumps bounce off the roof and Jane shrieks. Outside your window, Jade is laughing so hard you think she's also crying, her face pressed against the glass as her nose bleeds and the three of you scramble out of the car. Jake's spread eagle in the middle of the fucking road and both of them are bruised around the edges. Jade punches you when you refuse to hug her for fear of hurting her more, and hugs you anyway.

You spend the night in the middle of a field, squashed into the tiny tent they brought along, and they tell you how they'd been following you for the past two weeks.

"We kept landing too late, or too early -- " Jake says with his head in Jade's lap and is feet in John's.

"Or we were waaaay off base," Jade adds. They're both too skinny, scratched up and dirty, but when she follows you out on your way to take a piss, you fuck her against a tree anyway. The two of you come back to find Jake with Jane in his lap and his hand down John's pants. You lose track of where each body ends, and John comes in his jeans again.

All five of you are in a pile of limbs and you don't think you've laughed this hard since you were a kid.

xxx

You're having a hell of a time locating the Lalondes. Jane thinks it's because Roxy is voiding them out, and Jade thinks Roxy is voiding you all out.

She hasn't been able to find Dirk. She thinks the only reason she managed to find the three of you is because _you_ were there, and the universe is just all Space-Time.

You think it's because the three of you were just too fuckin' hot to miss, and the cool spot your swag causes can be seen from space. Everybody snickers and Jade touches your lips, telling you she thinks your accent is cute.

You tell her her teeth are all sorts of fucked up and her legs are hairier than yours, how the fuck. She knuckles you in the ribs and lifts her skirt to show of said hairy legs, along with her pristine lack of underwear.

You can't bring yourself to care. You don't think anyone else does either.

xxx

John thinks you all should start looking in the Big Apple.

Jade says, "No you fuck nut, Rose lives out in the middle of nowhere, remember?"

"Along a river," you add.

"Well, a river in the boonies is as good a place to start as any," Jake says.

Jane's phone chirps before anyone can say another word, and she stares at it wide eyed for a couple of moments. Slowly, she turns it towards the rest of you -- a series of numbers in orange. A grin blossoms across Jade's face and Jake whoops, "Hold on to your trousers, folks, first step's a doozey."

You remember reading the fourth Harry Potter when it came out, trading snark with Rose, but the scene with the portkey.. this is exactly like that. Exactly like that, except Rowling only described the gut yanking dizziness, but you've fallen through enough failed timelines to recognize the feeling of being _literally ripped the fuck apart_ on an atomic level.

You're slammed back together six feet above ground and it's only instinct that has you landing in a roll. You still stumble to your knees and vomit into the grass. From what you hear behind you, you're not the only one.

But Jade is laughing loudly and, when you look back, is sporting another nose bleed. Casey is no where to be found but you recognize the ginormous house as Rose's from your time as her server player and you grin.

You grin and kiss Jade full on the mouth, bloody nose and vomit coated lips and all, and run up to where you see people exiting the house.

To where your brother is exiting the house, to where _Rose_ is exiting the house. You scoop your pseudo twin up, swing her 'round in a full circle and Dirk snort-laughs and Roxy _shrieks_ and launches herself at you, knocking both you and Rose off the deck.

When Dirk speaks, it's directed at Jade, technical terms thrown out in an inorganic drawl, his syntax exactly the same as yours -- as _his_ Bro's, four hundred years dead and forever immortalized by youtube. It's creepy as fuck, but also kind of sweet, especially paired with the way he wraps his arms around Jane and Jake, a head taller than either of them and so god damned _awkward_ , like he doesn't even know how to touch people.

He probably doesn't, but considering the sheer number of cuddle piles everyone has so far gotten into, he'll probably learn.

xxx

Rose very primly refuses to let "an orgy that hits upon every Freudian concept commence on her lawn", so the eight of you shuffle into the house -- seven, technically, since Jade warps back to get the car and returns somewhere upstairs. Casey, thankfully, ends up outside, albeit on the wrong side of the fence.

They've amassed a pile in the front room, stacks of mattresses and pillows and couch cushions. You've no doubt that this is where the three of them have lived. The room smells of teenager; stale laundry and dirty dishes, and almost everything is some shade of pink-lavender or pretentious goth black.

Dirk looks hilariously out of place as he settles into the pile of stuffed cats and frilly pillows, his shades pushed back on top of his head so he can stare unimpeded. Roxy jumps in next to him, body flat and parallel to the floor before she even lands. She bounces twice and jostles Rose as she perches on the edge of the couch that acts as an extra wall.

They've made a nest, you realize, a mattress probably liberated from Rose's mom's room shoved into a corner and pinned there with the couch.

Jade and Jake follow them without any hesitation, cannon balling straight in. Jane picks her way in, careful not to step on any stray limbs and John drags you after him.

There's no Alpha-Beta line. The only reason there's a Derse-Prospit line is because you Dersites are all way too bony to be good pillows.

Dirk tries to use you and Rose as his pillow anyway, wedging himself in the non-existent space where your thigh is pressed against Rose's in a way that looks entirely uncomfortable. He's got his fingers twined with Jane and Jake's, and Roxy has her legs flung across his torso from where she's snuggled in Jane's lap. Your ecto-mom has arguably the best seat in the house, but Dirk looks so god damned smug laying right in the middle of the pile.

He's nothing like your Bro. For all his awkward social skills, he looks entirely, unabashedly, _happy_ to have physical contact with you all.

Rose starts off this round of what-the-fuck happened, waxing poetical about how, to start with, she was all alone in the house while her mother haunted her, talking like she's telling a god damned ghost story around a girl scout back yard camp fire.

"I couldn't help it!" Roxy chips in, laughter almost embarrassed, "Not my fault I wound up with mad invisible skills." She draws out the s sounds, sharpening them into z's like you think Terezi must have, like Latula totally did.

Rose rolls her eyes and Roxy says, "So she totally seanced my ass."

"It didn't exactly work. After all, I was not being haunted by my mother, I was being harassed by her alternate universe self who had no god damned control over her god powers."

"Sor-ry," Roxy snaps back and Rose's lips quirk up affectionately.

"Eventually Roxy got her Voiding under control, although that only applied to Voiding of _herself_ and not the rest of us, which makes it quite difficult to get anything delivered here."

Dirk snorts, "Understatement of the year."

"But yet, you still managed to find us, dear brother."

"Followed the scent of the massive girl boner Rox has for me."

Jade bursts into giggles and Roxy punches him in the shoulder. Jane covers her face with her hands, hiding her blush.

"Oh come off it, Janey, you're not _nearly_ as shy as you play," you drawl, waggling your eyebrows at her over your shades. Roxy shrieks with laughter, kicking her feet and jostling Dirk with her calves. A scuffle ensues that results with Dirk curled against your back like an angry cat and Jade wrapped around Roxy's legs.

The Prospit kids take over story time, each interrupting the others as they all try to tell how the five of you got here, to Rose's, which has you back tracking to talk about how _you_ got to Washington in the first place and Rose just watches you sadly, like she knows all the parts you glean over.

She probably does. Fucking Seers.

Dirk follows you, explaining how he took off up the opposite coast immediately after touch down, which explains how you didn't even know he existed in this 'verse until you met up with Jane and John. His speech is halting and awkward, even more so than the way he moves amongst people. You can feel the way he has to test out his words to make sure he has the right one, the correct pronunciation for things he's only ever seen in text. You think he's actually hiding behind you at this point. He's probably never spoken this much to this many people in his entire life, even in the game, as he goes through how he played wild man all up the East Coast, truly and honestly following this tiny mental thread of Roxy's feelings for him.

He doesn't get the reference you make when you call him a regular Bear Grylls and you are suddenly and unironically so completely _pale_ for him.

God damnit.

You suddenly get where John comes from when he says he's grossed out by directly doing the nasty with Jane and the trolls have it _so right_ with their stupid quadrants. You make a note to snuggle the fuck out of your bro in the creepiest and most ironic way the two of you can think of.

xxx

Once you're all done getting caught up, Rose calls for pizza on this monster looking phone, a piece of tech that looks like it was ripped out of an H. G. Wells novel and then tainted with eldritch horror. She offers the pizza guy an extra hundred bucks plus the cost of whatever if he'll stop by a grocery store and pick up a bunch of junk food and a couple gallons of apple juice with a wink towards you and, _yes_ she knows her address doesn't actually want to come up, that's why she gave him coordinates, and _yes_ she knows that's an hour drive one way, she'll double the cost of gas, she just wants fucking pizza.

Or rather, a dozen pizzas.

The pizza delivery guy rings the bell a couple of hours later when it's buttfuck dark and there's a scramble to put clothes back on. Rose answers the door in Jake's button up and not much else, her black lips gone pale in the middle twisted into the most _devious_ of smirks as she writes him a check with quite a few zeros involved then hands over a few folded bills to boot.

You laugh at her over the back of the couch, shirtless with a series of old-new hickeys spattering your pale shoulders like freckles.

You and John and Jake go help the guy bring pizzas up and you cackle the entire time as John pretends he doesn't actually have a boner and Jake completely misses the fact that he's in only his underwear and the poor dude spins his tires in his haste to get out.

"You evil bitch," you gasp at Rose, perched again on the arm of the couch with a slice of pizza balance delicately on her fingertips.

She shrugs; "I tipped him quite well."

The pizza is cold and came with probably the most boring selection of chips to ever be chosen, but the aj is damn good half frozen and for a while, it's just like a real sleep over.

A sleep over comprised of eight vaguely supernatural teenagers who are more or less all related and largely incapable of keeping fully dressed.

xxx

The bed is too small for all eight of you to cram on there and actually sleep, but you try anyway. You're wedged between Dirk and Rose, Jake's hand under your chin even though he's on the other side of Jane, on the other side of Dirk, and your leg has gone numb where Jade is laying across it.

It's a little too sweaty but these are _your people_ , the ones who went through Hell and back with you, and you with them. So you don't mind that Roxy somehow kicks you in her sleep despite being wedged between Rose and the couch where John's sleeping, and you definitely don't mind the breeze John whips up in his sleep when he, apparently, ends up too warm himself.

You're surrounded by seven of the people who know you best and you don't think you've felt this loved since you were a kid.

xxx

Rose is the first to wake, and you're not surprised. She wakes you in turn as she wiggles out of the pile of sweaty godkids, her make up faded and smudged and her perfect little tits crossed with lines from wrinkled sheets. She catches you staring and waggles her eyebrows at you before shuffling off to the kitchen. You follow her, stepping over Jade where she rolled off the bed for more room on the floor, and Dirk mumbles sleepily and takes over the spot you vacated.

Rose hands you a cup of coffee, glowing in the morning summer light. It tastes so much better than coffee from the veil, troll coffee made of body parts like every god damned other thing from Alternia. It's cold and probably left over from some other day, but it's still just so easy to lean against the counter next to her, with your wrinkled jeans and your I-never-quite-figured-out-deoderant teen stink while she still looks like a radiant goddess of light and good luck.

Just like old times.

"Your phone don't work," you tell her, "The number I have. From before?"

She nods and sucks the black from the cracks of her lips.

"I know," she says, "I'm sorry."

You think she actually means it.

xxx

There's something hard in the lines of Rose's movements as you wait for everyone else to wake up. They do, one by one, and despite the nervous energy in your twin, you feel like you're home for the first time in ages.

She keeps looking at the clock.

After an hour of watching her fuss over Time, you ask her, "When are you waiting for?"

"I'm not sure," she tells you. You're just waiting on Roxy and Jake now, and Jade's happy chatter covers your voices.

" _What_ are you waiting for?"

She smiles and she looks so tired. "Visitors."

xxx

There's a fizzy crackle of static before the video clears enough to make out figures. You know those horns, and you grin fiercely before the audio cuts in properly and you're fed lines more pretentious than anything Rose ever came up for her wizard porn.

" -- And though I greatly protest the offensive and potentially triggering terms, which are completely and understandably xenophobic -- "

It's Kankri and you can't help snickering as Karkat shoves him out of the frame.

"You fuckers better be alive," Karkat snarls, black lips pulled into a grin, "Because I don't think this ass faced moron will ever shut up about me calling _you_ ass faced morons "aliens"."

His face takes up the entire screen and his eyes are brilliantly red.

"We've been assured by all Seers and Time players that this'll land in the right fucking place, but in case it doesn't, better bend over and kiss your shame globes goodbye because I will forcibly rip them off -- " Kankri protests in the background and Karkat spits, "Oh shut it, you ninny.

"Sollux's set up a private server you should be able to reach. I've been instructed to relate the IP via Alternian text, so I'll do that in a moment. It's going to try to reject you at every fucking turn so don't be fucking idiots. I know it's hard for your entire species as a whole, but seriously, if any one of you fucks this up I will probably implode from just being in the same universe as your vast stupidity.

"Shut _up_ , Kankri, seriously.

"There's a bunch of randomized passwords but they all relate to the game and come with a corresponding question, blah blah blah, seriously Sollux could you have been any more paranoid, fuck me -- "

He's obviously reading from a script, scanning over whatever he's reading off of as he mouths words.

"Blah blah blah, whatever. None of this is all that important and we're getting close to the end of the window so -- " he holds a piece of paper up to the screen with thick, black squiggles. You recognize the text but you can't read it. Karkat says, "Your Prince and Rogue should be able to translate. Make sure you get it down _exactly_. Fuck knows what'll happen if you don't.

"We're looking forward to invading the fuck out of you pitiful losers."

xxx

PAST carcinoGeneticist [PCG] 1408934:25 hours ago opened private bulletin board GET IN THE SPACESHIP FUCKERS

CURRENT timeusTestified [TT] RIGHT NOW responded to the memo.

TT : check one two

CURRENT carcinoGeneticist [CG] RIGHT NOW responded to the memo.

CG : OH THANK FUCK.  
CG : AND ALSO, SHUT THE FUCK UP DAVE AND GET ON YOUR OWN HANDLE.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Watching Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/971105) by [Isis_the_Sphinx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis_the_Sphinx/pseuds/Isis_the_Sphinx)




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